For those who are not aware of this software, Nik Collection is a set of software accessibly as plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom. The software boosts one’s ability in using some smooth effects such as monochrome, HDR, and sharpening. Its indeed a handy tool and mostly used by photographers.

Google Acquired the Nik Collection from a company in the year of 2012, with a costing price of $500. The product was later sold for $150, and three years later Nik Collection became absolutely free in the year of 2016. With the software being free it grew in popularity, the software is compatible with Window Vista through Windows 8, Mac OS X 10. 7 to 10.10, and Adobe Photoshop through CC2015.

During the transition from paid to free, Google gave a comment on the software’s future by an announcement as follows; “As we continue to focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile, including Google Photos and Snapseed, we've decided to make the Nik Collection desktop suite available for free, so that now anyone can use it.”

Photo source: PetaPixel

This recent announcement from Google, concerning the cease of support for the Nik Collection will let a lot of photographers and designers saddened. For people who normally used third party softwares for their production workflow, will now have to use preceding versions of the parent software’s such as Photoshop and Lightroom.

The Rest of the Nik Software, which is fixated on desktop photo editing, will be available but no future updates coming soon, which might lead Google to make the Nik Collection software open source for developers to continue developing the software and to keep it functioning. More so, If the software eventually becomes open source loyalist might get some peace of mind.